Tsar

by Ted Bell

  The women, he had to admit, were mostly beautiful. Lots of low-cut dresses, sequins, and major bling. A whole lot of very big blonde hair. You had a good cross-section of wives, trophy wives, girlfriends, and professionals. Some of them had to be imports from the Ukraine, some of them were clearly home-grown, and a few were right up there with South Florida’s finest.

  Sharkey deserved a lot of credit and maybe a raise for the idea of using Fancha’s yacht as the surveil vehicle. Since the party was mostly on the back lawn around the pool, the docked boat was the only feasible way to cover this assignment. He had to laugh every time he looked out at Fado, thinking about the countless hours he’d spent staking out some dirtbag in Queens, munching doughnuts, freezing his tail off behind the wheel of some crummy Dodge Dart with a bad heater.

  Down below in the cabin, positioned in front of his monitors and camera controls, Harry Brock was a busy boy. Every time a couple of guys or a group out on the lawn strayed anywhere near the boat, you’d see that portside outrigger come creeping around, dangling the little Skycam over their unsuspecting heads. He even had instant replay on the damn thing.

  Harry had been right about the outrigger as a camera and boom mike. People were so deep into the cocktail hour now that nobody seemed to notice when the stray outrigger on the big sportfish did weird things, waving around over people’s heads like a magic wand.

  Stoke decided to make his way inside the palazzo. People were coming and going, and it wouldn’t hurt to see what was going on indoors, beyond the camera’s reach. The house, mobbed with people, was pretty much what you’d expect, a style Stoke called Early Boca. Twenty-foot ceilings. A lot of heavily gilded furniture and artwork that was supposed to look as if it had come from some Italian castle. Big curving stairway with a huge bad portrait of the owner’s wife halfway up the curving wall. Chandeliers of melting icicles they’d maybe bought at Mickey’s Magic Castle Gift Shoppe over in Orlando.

  He pushed his way into the foyer (fwa-yay, as his buddy Chief Inspector Ambrose Congreve would say) and stepped through the double front doors at the home’s grand entrance. There he paused to admire the steady stream of gleaming Bentleys, Rollers, Escalades, Rangers, and big black Hummers. None of them, of course, could hold a candle to his 1965 black raspberry GTO convertible, capable of a standing quarter-mile in less than eight seconds. Street legal.

  The gleaming parade of pimped-up rides was coming through the ornate iron entrance gates and rolling to a stop under the portico where the valet boys waited. A bright red Ferrari Enzo rumbled up, and three valet guys converged on it as if somebody had just dropped a million-dollar bill on the pavement, which they probably had.

  Stoke checked his watch. It was past nine o’clock, and Fancha was supposed to sing “Happy Birthday” at nine-thirty sharp, so a lot of people were eager to get back to the pool. Stoke thought half the guests had probably come because she was singing. Wouldn’t surprise him if it was more than half. Girl was climbing the charts.

  The woman he maybe loved was maybe, just maybe, on her way to stardom, and it made him proud to catch her name whispered around the room.

  Have you heard that beautiful girl sing? Fancha? Go! Go out there! You’ve got to hear her!

  Something was going on out on the front lawn. There was a white bakery truck, looked like, motor still running, pulled over on the grass, and the driver was standing outside surrounded by a few of the black-shirt boys. Pretty tense situation. Stoke decided he had time to go check it out.

  “Fuck you doing, coming in the main gate?” one guy was screaming at the driver. “You didn’t see the sign, ‘Service Entrance,’ around the side? Whaddya, blind, you dumb shit?”

  The delivery guy, who looked like a big blond bear in white pajamas, wasn’t backing down. He’d didn’t look as if he’d back down from Mike Tyson, to tell the truth. He got up in the guy’s face quick.

  “Listen up, pal, like I said, I got the freaking birthday cake in the back there. It won’t fit through the pantry door. So I’m bringing it around to bring it in the front door. Because it’s wider. Okay? Just like your caterers in the kitchen told me to do. Awright with you, you skinny fuck?”

  The driver’s white outfit had the name “Happy” stitched over his breast pocket. It said “Happy’s Bake Shoppe” on the side of the white truck. This Happy character was a big guy, seriously large, and the security guys were having some second thoughts about messing with his ass too much.

  “Is there a problem?” Stoke asked, pushing his way past two of the black-shirted Russian muscle boys.

  “There was one. Now we have another one. You. Who the hell are you?”

  Russians so full of attitude lately, you notice that? Still pissed about that Cold War thing, Stoke figured. And now that they were rich, well, you know how that goes. He smiled at the guy, stuck out his hand.

  “Sheldon Levy. Suncoast Artist Management. I’m coordinating this evening’s entertainment for your employer, Mr. Lukov. I hate to interrupt this little scuffle, but the lovely Fancha is scheduled to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the guest of honor in fifteen minutes. I’m afraid if we don’t get that cake through the door and out to the stage, all of our timing will go down the tubes. I don’t think Mr. Lukov would be very happy about that, do you gentlemen agree?”

  Happy the Baker smiled at Stokely. “Finally, someone around here who makes some freaking sense.”

  “Can I offer you a hand with the cake?” Stoke asked Happy.

  “Nah, we’ll help him,” a black shirt said. “C’mon, guys, gimme a hand here with this freaking cake, all right?”

  As the security team opened up the van and unloaded the huge white and pink cake, Stoke went over and offered Happy his hand. Something about the guy looked very familiar.

  “Sheldon Levy,” he said.

  “I’m Happy,” the baker said, pumping his hand. If he’d expected Stoke’s hand to be small and breakable, he was sorely disappointed.

  “Yeah? You’re Happy, huh? Good thing your momma didn’t name you Gay, right?” Stoke laughed. The guy didn’t seem to get it.

  “Have we met before?” Stoke said. He was sure he’d either met this guy or seen his picture fairly recently.

  “The Steiner wedding?” Happy said. “Maybe that was it.”

  “I missed that one. Didn’t make the cut, I guess. No, somewhere else, must be. C’mon out back, Happy, I’ll introduce you to Fancha.”

  “You know Fancha?”

  “Know her? I’m her manager. C’mon, we’ll make sure they don’t drop your cake going through the house. Cake like that, what does that beauty go for, Happy?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Hundred?”

  “Thousand.”

  “For a cake? You got Celine Dion in there? Well, it’s a work of art. I’m sure it will be a huge surprise for the guest of honor.”

  “Oh, you’re right about that, Mr. Levy. A huge surprise.”

  Happy looked happy as he saw his masterpiece being paraded through the crowded house above everyone’s head and lofted out toward the stage overlooking the deep end of the pool.

  Fancha was just finishing up one of the hit songs from Green Island Girl, one that might go gold called “A Minha Vida,” when the cake arrived onstage with her.

  She looked at the six-foot-high frosted monstrosity and said softly into the mike, “Isn’t that beautiful? A symbol of one life lived. You know the word fado itself means fate, destiny, and-oh, here’s the birthday boy himself! Let’s give him a big round of applause, shall we?”

  A thin, clean-shaven man, with dark, deep-set eyes beneath fierce black brows, stepped up to the microphone. It was Ramzan, all right, although in the pictures in his dossier, he’d had a luxuriant beard. He was swaying a little bit and had a kind of goofy grin plastered on his face for a fierce Chechen warlord. Miami got to people, Stoke thought, that’s all there was to it. Ramzan looked out at the crowd and spoke, sounding like that Ali G guy in that Borat movie, but that
was just Stoke’s opinion.

  “I want to thank my dear friend Vlad for having this wonderful excitement party. And all of you coming. I am very happy we can take time out from our struggle and come together in such a joyful party time.”

  That was the wonderful excitement speech, and then Fancha took the mike off the stand. The crowd got quiet fast as she sang the opening lyrics with the voice of an unreachable angel. Behind her, they were lighting the candles on the cake, waiters standing on stepladders. The candles lit up like sparklers, and the crowd cheered as Fancha lit up the whole night with her voice.

  “Happy birthday to you…happy birthday…”

  Stoke smiled at her and then looked around at Happy standing a few feet behind him. He had a funny look on his face. A little nervous, maybe. Nervous? About what? His cake was a hit.

  A big surprise.

  Stoke raised his sleeve to his lips and whispered, “Harry?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You getting this?”

  “You bet.”

  “Zoom in on the baker in the white suit. Big gorilla. A few feet behind me. Wait, he’s moving away. You got him?”

  “Yeah, I got him. Let me get a close-up.”

  “Does he look familiar to-”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “What?”

  “Stoke! Get the hell out of there! Now! Grab Fancha and run…”

  “What? What is it?”

  A big surprise.

  “That’s the Omnibomber! The guy the FBI thinks blew up that prison a few weeks ago. Little Miss. The Death Row Bomber. I saw the prison security-camera shots just yesterday. It’s him, all right.”

  “Oh, shit. The cake.”

  “Yeah, the cake. Gotta be. Come on, Stoke. You gotta move. Get out now, Stoke! I mean it. Those candles, those are probably fuses or somebody’s got a remote detonator, one or the other. Go! Go!”

  Stoke looked around. Fancha was still singing her birthday song, her eyes on Ramzan, making it just for him. The baker was gone, melted into the crowd and probably headed for his truck. He looked at the candles, spewing fiery sparks. They’d burned almost all the way down to the icing on the cake. Time to go.

  He stepped up onto the stage, right behind Fancha, swept her up into his arms, and leaned into the microphone. Fancha was squirming, trying to finish her song, looking at him as if he’d lost his mind.

  Stoke said, “Isn’t she fabulous, ladies and gentlemen? The lovely Fancha! We’ll be taking a short break while the guest of honor blows out all those candles, but don’t worry, folks, she’ll be back for an encore!”

  With that, Stoke stepped off the stage, Fancha twisting in his arms, and started pushing his way through the crowd headed toward the dock. He could see Sharkey on the bow, already heaving the bow line ashore, and Stoke heard the muffled roar of Fado’s big diesels coming to life.

  He saw Harry at the top of the tower, screaming at him to hurry, hurry, and the crowd finally had thinned to the point where he could break into a full-tilt run across the sloping lawn toward the dock.

  Sharkey was on the stern, heaving the line, and the big Viking’s props were churning now. She was beginning to edge away from the dock.

  Two of the black shirts saw him coming and stepped in front of him. Stoke just ran right through them, flinging them to either side, and they sprawled to the ground. He had maybe twenty yards to reach the dock. The distance between the boat and the dock was opening up fast. Three feet, four…he sprinted that last bit, took a running jump off the dock, and leaped across the widening gap, landing hard on the deck in the aft cockpit. He managed to keep his balance and hold tightly to Fancha at the same time.

  “Are you crazy? Put me down!” Fancha shouted in his ear, pounding on his shoulders with her fists.

  There was a lot of shouting and confusion back on the lawn as Harry leaned on the throttles and the big yacht jumped up on plane and roared away from the dock.

  “Go!” Stoke yelled up at Brock, “Hit it! Get us out of here!”

  Stoke was in a crouch, moving with Fancha toward the door to the main salon, when the whole world was rocked on its side. The night sky lit with a white flash and then an intense blossoming orange glow that was blinding. Stoke, still cradling Fancha in his arms, dropped to the deck as the shockwave of the massive explosion slammed the big yacht, rolling her over onto her side, nearly broaching her completely. Stoke and Fancha slid down the deck, crashing against the gunwale. He protected her as best he could, but both of them were stunned.

  Fado righted herself, rolling violently. At the top of the tower, Harry, clinging desperately to the wildly careening helm station, managed to hold on and speed away from the scene of horrible death and destruction behind them. Fado-intact, it seemed-roared out into the blackness of the empty bay. Stoke lifted his head and looked back at her wildly foaming white wake. In the distance, he could see the point of land protruding into the bay. No lights on, either around the pool or what was left of the house. No one moving, small fires blazing everywhere.

  Where the pool had been, nothing but a large black hole. The whole backside of the house was gone, and you could look into the interior rooms of the Russian’s flaming mansion as if it was some kind of oversized, burnt-out dollhouse.

  He looked down at Fancha, her head in his lap, staring up at him with those great big beautiful wide-open eyes.

  “You okay, sugar? You hurt anywhere?”

  “I thought you’d lost your mind, Stoke, grabbing me off that stage.”

  “I was just trying not to lose you.”

  “Oh, baby. I never saw somebody move so fast. I didn’t know anybody could run like that.”

  “You watch me run to you next time you call my name.”

  She reached up and brushed his cheek with the back of her hand.

  “Stokely Jones Jr., I don’t know how to-”

  “Shh. You thank me later. I’ve got to go see if Harry and Sharkey are okay, jump on the horn, tell my clients in D.C. what just happened to Comrade Ramzan.”

  “Love you, baby.”

  “Love you more.”

  Stoke shrugged out of his jacket, folded it, and put it beneath Fancha’s head. Then he started climbing the stainless ladder to the top of the tower, moving fast.

  Harry Brock was up there, staring at something in the sky through his binoculars.

  “Holy shit. Will you look at that?”

  “What?”

  “Over there. To the west, just coming up over the Miami Herald building. Some kind of fuckin’ UFO or something.”

  Stoke looked at the thing. “Damn.”

  “What the hell is that thing, Stoke?”

  “Some kind of new airship, I guess. Doesn’t look like any blimp I ever saw. Military, maybe, looking for go-fast drug boats coming up from the Keys.”

  It was massive, whatever the hell it was. Stoke stared at the great silver ship floating over the Miami skyline toward him, a giant round opening where the nose should be. Weird-looking. Scary-looking, almost.

  Make that definitely scary-looking.

  18

  BERMUDA

  Hawke, arriving at Shadowlands, found Ambrose Congreve standing at the front door, dressed to the nines, but adamantly refusing to get into the automobile Hawke had shown up in.

  “Some car, isn’t it?” Hawke said, grinning. “Absolutely ripping.”

  “I simply won’t ride into town in that contraption, Alex,” Congreve said. “I won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not? Look at it. It’s a deathtrap, for one thing. No doors, no roof. It’s utterly ridiculous.”

  “It has a delightful roof. A daffodil surrey roof of fringed canvas, I’ll grant you, and the fringe is a bit outré, but a roof all the same.”

  Congreve disdainfully tapped one of the tiny moon-shaped wheel covers with the tip of his walking stick, making a hollow, tinny sound. He looked at Hawke and did not bother to disguise his sigh of frustration.

  “Fra
nkly, Alex, I find it astounding that you can transit this island in such a conveyance and keep a straight face. This…car, if one can call it such, looks as if it formerly belonged to a circus clown.”

  “Mind your tongue, Constable. And get in the damn thing. C is waiting, and we’re already late.”

  “Yes, and this is quite a serious meeting he’s invited us to. We’re taking on the dreaded Russians again, Alex. If Sir David happens to be standing outside the club when we arrive, he’ll think he’s invited the bloody Ringling Brothers to help him save Western civilization.”

  Hawke tried not to laugh out loud.

  Because of traffic congestion on the small island, every residence on Bermuda was allotted only one vehicle per household. Hawke was driving the car that had come along with his cottage. This tiny vehicle by the noble Italian design house of Pininfarina, was a 1958 Fiat 600 Jolly, and he’d somehow acquired it when he signed his lease for Teakettle Cottage.

  It was an odd duck, to be honest, bright sunshine yellow, with seats made, improbably enough, of wicker.

  But Hawke thought it quite sporting, and certainly Pelham enjoyed squiring the Jolly around town on his market runs each week. Besides, Congreve was right, there were few places on earth where a man could drive such an outrageous automobile and maintain a straight face. But Bermuda was one of those places.

  Congreve sighed one of his immense sighs and settled his rather large person into the wicker armchair bolted after a fashion to the floor. He was shocked to discover that even the dashboard was wicker. He looked at Hawke with dismay. He felt as if he were riding in a ladies’ sewing basket.

  He put his smart straw hat firmly on his head and prepared for the worst.

  “Not even an airbag?” Congreve said, running his fingers along the wicker dash.

  “Oh, I daresay it’s got one now,” Hawke said, engaging first gear. “On the passenger side at any rate.”